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The shortlist of photographers for this year’s Prix Pictet, which carries a prize of 100,000 Swiss francs ($104,496 US) and recognizes photography on social and environmental challenges, was announced at the Rencontres d’Arles photo festival yesterday. All 12 photographers on the short list will be exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in London in October. In addition to the cash prize, the winner will receive an assignment from Pictet & Cie, the Geneva-based bank that founded the prize in 2008, to visit a region where the bank supports an environmental sustainability project.

The theme of this year’s prize is power. The 12 photo projects have been exhibited or published over the past 12 years. As the haunting slide show on the homepage of the Prix Pictet Web site shows, the projects cover the uses and abuses of power—both political power and energy—and span from Guantanamo Bay to Chernobyl to Fukushima to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The finalists are:

Robert Adams, for Turning Back, 1999
Daniel Beltrá, for his series “Spill,” 2010
Mohamed Bourouissa, for “Périphérique,” 2006
Philippe Chancel, for “Fukushima: The Irresistible Power of Nature,” 2011
Edmund Clark, for Guantanamo: If the Light Goes Out, 2009
Carl de Keyzer, for Moments Before the Flood, 2009-2011
Luc Delahaye, for various works made between 2008-2011, including work shot in Haiti after the earthquake
Rena Effendi, for “Still Life in the Zone,” 2010
Jacqueline Hassink, for “Arab Domains,” 2005-2006
An-My Lê, for “29 Palms,” 2003-2004
Joel Sternfeld, for When it Changed, 2007
Guy Tillim, for the series “Congo Democratic,” 1997-2006

The finalists were selected from over 600 international nominees by an eight-person jury that includes photographer Mitch Epstein (last year’s Prix Pictet winner), Martin Roth, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Fumio Nanjo, director Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum.

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